The armies of the media are gathering in the American heartland. With each new poll come shrieks of joy, or panic. When Monday night finally arrives, this first test of the candidates will be treated as an immeasurably consequential event, honored by column-miles of type and pixels, and uncountable hours of analysis—almost all of which will conceal the cold, hard reality: The Iowa caucuses have become a blight on American politics.

For 40 years, a state with an otherwise admirable civic life has been the scene of a quadrennial exercise that is the antithesis of a rational, accessible democratic process.By any measure—participation and representativeness, to mention two—it fails the most basic test of what you would want in an exercise that so dominates the attention and resources of campaigns and the media.

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Iowa looks nothing like the rest of the nation, and its wintry, time-consuming caucuses make participation difficult, if not impossible, for much of the citizenry—especially those with limited economic means. The Democratic caucuses in particular take two of the core principles of a free system—the secret ballot and one-person-one-vote—and throw them away.

Indeed, if you look beyond the color and the pageantry, beyond the county fairs and butter cows, and appreciate the real workings and impact of the caucuses, you realize that Iowa is neither a useful bellwether or an important test for candidates. Moreover, there are baleful consequences of the inflated status of Iowa: It distorts the political process and leads to bad public policy.

Iowa survives and flourishes as a political ritual for the same reason that bad people remain in power and bad policies remain in place: those who benefit from it can make the cost of challenging it too high. If there is no hope of unseating the caucuses from their privileged perch, it’s at least worth understanding how we got here—and at what cost.

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Iowa isn’t an immutable fact of American political life. It began its rise to outsize importance only a few decades ago, through mere happenstance. In 1968, opponents of the Vietnam War, looking to mount challenges to the policy and to President Lyndon Johnson, discovered in state after state that they were effectively shut out of the process of choosing delegates. Primaries were few, and in many states, delegates had been chosen months before, with little or no public notice. In the wake of the tumultuous, divisive Chicago Democratic National Convention, a commission was formed to propose ways of opening up the process. Many states chose the primary route; Iowa chose a different path.

For decades, Iowa parties had used a multistage caucus process to choose the state’s national convention delegates; part of a system that was also designed to let party members debate and discuss party platforms and other matters. After 1968, with national mandates requiring greater representation, Iowa Democrats changed their calendar to provide more time between each stage. Since the 1972 caucus was scheduled for May 20, that meant the first stage—precinct caucuses—had to be held four months earlier, on January 24. There was no intent to turn these caucuses into a major event on the presidential nominating calendar, but that’s what happened. Suddenly, Iowa was first. And one campaign was quick to see the possibilities.

In 1972, George McGovern, the long-shot antiwar candidate for president, was looking for a way to demonstrate that he had more support than the national polls suggested (3 percent according to a January 1972 Gallup poll). Rallying antiwar Democrats, McGovern managed to win a bit less than a quarter of Iowa’s “delegate equivalents” (a number designed to reflect a candidate’s strength at the next stage of the process, one that still sows confusion four decades later), finishing behind Ed Muskie and “Uncommitted.” Following McGovern’s eventual nomination victory, the potential power of the caucuses drew the attention of the next long-shot contender—and that’s where everything changed.

In the 1976 cycle, the cash-strapped, much-mocked campaign of Jimmy Carter targeted Iowa as the place to demonstrate early, surprising support—and it paid off when Carter won a straw poll at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Ames. The next day, R.W. “Johnny” Apple, the star political reporter of the New York Times, filed a story headlined “Carter Appears to Hold a Solid Lead in Iowa.” On caucus night, Carter won more “delegate equivalents” than any other candidate at the caucuses. Though he actually finished second, behind “Uncommitted,” he instantly turned from “Jimmy Who?” into the front-runner.

In the decades since, potential candidates have signaled their intentions by visiting Iowa at the pre-larval stage of the election calendar. Rep. Dick Gephardt, a 1988 contender, made his first visit on March 25, 1985—barely two months after Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural. This year’s current Iowa leader, Ted Cruz, made his first trip to Iowa more than two years ago, in August 2013, seven months after taking his seat as a freshman in the U.S. Senate. And unlike in the Carter-era experience, the media are now there to detect the first, faint signs of campaign activity.

For its part, while Iowa did not set out to make itself the 800-pound gorilla of presidential politics, it quickly embraced the benefits—financial, political and otherwise. This is fully understandable. What Iowan wouldn’t want the perks that come from being first? Local party officials are courted for months; local reporters are showcased in and on national media. Tens of millions of dollars pour into local radio and TV stations, hotels, restaurants, car rental offices and retail outlets, always happy to supply foul-weather gear to clueless operatives and media types who seek to navigate the elements in unlined trench coats and loafers. While the defensiveness can be grating, it’s no more so than a Kentuckian’s insistence that coal is a healthy fuel, or a New York hedge-fund big shot embracing the “carried interest” rule. It usually comes with a suggestion that critics of the caucus are contemptuous of smaller “fly-over states,” though they do not explain why the same smaller, fly-over state gets to be first every time.

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Well, you might ask, what’s wrong with Iowa as the starting point of the process? It’s a state with a high literacy rate, an exceptionally high turnout rate in general elections, an un-gerrymandered congressional map, and a reputation for clean government. Its population of 3 million-plus and its location put it more or less in the middle of the country by size and site. Doesn’t it make sense to have a venue that doesn’t require millions of dollars’ worth of campaign contributions to be competitive?

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To begin with, there’s the uncomfortable fact that Iowa is not really a representative state. The most obvious is demographic: It is 94 percent white, 2.8 percent black and 5.5 percent Hispanic, making it one of the five whitest states in the nation. It’s also the fourth oldest state in the union. This is one reason why a victory by Bernie Sanders in Iowa and then in New Hampshire—another very, very white state—may signal much less about the state of the Democratic Party race than first appears. As longtime Democratic operative Joe Trippi notes, “After Iowa and New Hampshire, the Democratic Primary race the rest of the way is an electorate that is 54 percent white and 46 percent minority.” Thus, a victory in Iowa (and New Hampshire) is about as unreflective a measure of Democratic sentiment as imaginable.

When it comes to the Republican side, Iowa is similarly out of phase. Some 57 percent of GOP caucus-goers consider themselves “evangelicals,” higher than any non-Southern or border state. That goes a long way toward explaining why the Rev. Pat Robertson finished ahead of the sitting vice president of the United States in 1988, why ordained minister Mike Huckabee beat Mitt Romney in 2008, and why Rick Santorum narrowly bested Romney four years ago—all candidates with scant national appeal.

Demographics, however, are the least of it. It’s the processand the timingof the caucuses—particularly the Democrats’ process—that demonstrates why this is so unsuited to the outsize role it has assumed. Together, those two factors combine in a toxic blend.

Adherents of the caucuses extol their open, freewheeling nature, where civic-minded Iowans join with each other in a celebration of democracy. But the central fact about the Iowa caucuses is that they inherently, inevitably, lead to very low turnout. Back in 2008, the last time both parties had contests, the coverage, particularly on the Democratic side, centered on Barack Obama’s ability to draw first-time participants, with much talk about the record-breaking number of participants.

And, after years of focus on Iowa, after a historic effort by the Obama campaign to draw new participants to the caucuses and a major push by evangelicals on the Republican side for Huckabee, what were the numbers? According to Thomas Patterson of the Kennedy School of Government, the combined two-party turnout amounted to just 16.3 percent of the eligible electorate. While the turnout of 350,000 was widely touted as a record-breaking showing, a Harvard Kennedy School study put that figure in context. “In percentage terms, Iowa’s turnout was hardly earthshaking—only 1 in 6 of the eligible adults participated. The Democratic winner, Barack Obama, received the votes of just 4 percent of Iowa’s eligible voters. Mike Huckabee, the Republican victor, attracted the support of a mere 2 percent of Iowa adults,” the study said. By contrast, take a look at the other massively covered early contest: The combined turnout in New Hampshire, the first primary state, was 51.9 percent.